If you have not watched The Wire, incidentally, you are less of a human being. I am just saying: get on that.

I was vaguely tempted to do the legendarily mediocre progressive rap band instead, but they didn’t have enough members and there’s no “Chaotic Not Good at Songs” alignment.

Also, Andrew Wheeler, in homage, did an alignment chart for Glee here, although he made Rachel not be evil, which – no.

Over at BadAssNerd I’m getting called out for the Mad Men alignment chart:

Betty isn’t evil. At all. Frankly, I think it’s sexist that she keeps getting pigeonholed as the bad guy on the show when she’s no more bad than many of the men. Her crime – she’s not that much fun. Which is why the truly evil Roger Sterling gets to be Neutral Evil on the chart. He’s fun. We like watching him. But unlike Betty, Roger deliberately hurts people, and he does it for his own pleasure. He’s mean and he’s untrustworthy and he’s vain and he’s selfish. Truly Chaotic Evil.

Firstly, “the men” on Mad Men are varying levels of bad. Lane is honestly pretty decent, all things considered (yes, I know, disintegrating marriage – but he tries to make it work for longer than he frankly should, continues to support his estranged wife as is proper, and immediately tries to find another dedicated relationship). Sal is a big sweetheart. Don usually tries to be a good person and succeeds maybe half the time if he’s lucky. Ken is self-interested, but not amorally so. Bert Cooper is old-school for both good and bad. Harry is developing his asshole streak at present. The only real bastards on the show are Pete and Roger, and oh look they’re in the bottom row with Betty.

Secondly, I take issue with the idea that Betty isn’t evil because she’s “no worse than many of the men.” Betty is a meanspirited person. She clearly takes pleasure in hurting people she doesn’t like. She’s incredibly hateful – even borderline abusive – towards Sally. She’s capricious, inconstant and unreliable. She’s wildly paranoid and a massive control freak as regards her own personal preferences.

Now, because Mad Men is a good show, it develops why Betty is these things. I mean, Betty is pretty clearly fucked up. The show’s implied that she’s the product of an abusive, loveless upbringing. She’s so terrified of her own problems she’s only willing to talk about them with a child psychologist and then only in the context of small talk.

All of this is certainly true, but just because there are valid, understandable reasons that Betty has become a horrible person doesn’t change the fact that she’s a horrible person. It honestly strikes me as patronizing to say that because she’s a woman and therefore without an equivalent degree of personal agency to the men of the show, she can’t make her own moral and ethical decisions: she does so over the course of the series and unflaggingly makes the wrong/bad/selfish ones constantly. That’s evil, for the purpose of the Alignment Game.

Since the Mad Men one started up nerd slapfights in half a dozen places on the internet, here is another! I hereby declare it Alignment Chart Week here at mgkdotcom!

Originally invented by Leonard Pierce, Wikibombing is the hot Internet sport wherein you find two related categories on Wikipedia, and the nerdier of the two is, inevitably, the longer article. The original Wikibomb was “Knight” as compared to “Jedi Knight,” but that is now out of date thanks to some medieval history buffs. However, there are always new Wikibombs to be found!

For example:

Medical Doctor
VS.
Doctor Who

Asgard
VS.
Asgard in Marvel comics

“The Brave Little Tailor”
VS.
Garak on Deep Space Nine

Gated community
VS.
Stargate

the Lancia Stratos
VS.
Wheeljack

Krill
VS.
Kree

Nothing
VS.
Seinfeld

Beat those!

Because even if it does happen I will not really care one way or the other.

Memo to Whedonites acting like this is the apocalypse: congratulations, you are now just like those people who complained that Starbuck wasn’t a dude in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, that Chris Pine could never possibly be a convincing James T. Kirk, and… did anybody ever complain about all the Stargate spinoffs? I assume somebody did. You are like that person too.

I’ve already seen it and was mightily impressed, but I figure people might want to discuss it. So have at it in the comments, y’all.

We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.

During the course of the comments thread on my post last week (and by the way, I’m just going to take half a second and digress to thank everyone who comments. Seriously, blogging is a writing gig that provides absolutely no financial recompense for most of the people who do it, but getting to hear so many people provide you with intelligent feedback on your work makes it all worth it. You’re all wonderful people, thanks!)

…in any event, during the course of the comments thread on my post last week, malakim2099 said, “Also, I would suggest this, because frankly the current status of comics bugs me. Let the characters age naturally. Or close to it. See, right now, if comics followed real chronology, Scott Summers should be the Professor of Xavier’s institute, Franklin Richards the grizzled field leader of the X-Men, etc. And that’s just a tiny example. The recent bout of “legacy” characters stepping in is a good thing (Steve Rogers as Director of SHIELD while Bucky is Cap, or Dick and Steph as Batman and Batgirl), but it’s a baby step in the right direction.” (They provided paragraph breaks, by the way. I condensed it slightly.)

And it’s interesting to me, because this is by no means the first time I’ve heard that statement, or some variation on it. The idea that comic book universes should age in real time seems to be a tremendously popular one in fandom, but everyone who espouses it seems to take it as self-evident. I’ve heard the idea dozens of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a justification for it.

The reasons against it are pretty obvious, of course; for one thing, it rests on the false assumption that comics time and real time are actually equivalent, despite the fact that a comics story that can take a year to come out might only cover a week of real time. (Fun comics fact: Uncanny X-Men #164 to Excalibur #24 take place over a single 365-day period, according to Chris Claremont. (Kitty Pryde’s 14th birthday takes place while she’s in space, infected with a Brood embryo, while her 15th birthday takes place right after she returns from the Cross-Time Caper.) This means that everything during that span, including both Secret Wars, Iron Man’s losing his company during his descent into alcoholism and his subsequent return to power as CEO, Spider-Man changing his costume from red-and-blue to black and then back to red-and-blue, Captain America being stripped of his super-heroic identity by the federal government and returned to power, several line-up changes in the Fantastic Four, the entire invasion at the hands of the Dire Wraiths and subsequent war, the destruction of Xavier’s mansion and the seeming death of the entire team of X-Men, the Mutant Massacre, and the temporary conversion of New York into a demonic outpost of the Limbo dimension…all take place in one year. Gives a new definition to “annus horribilis”, doesn’t it?)

For another thing, it’s never going to happen because comics fans (especially casual fans) read a series for more than just the title. When you read “The Fantastic Four”, you’re reading about more than just four people who are pretty damned fantastic. You’re reading for the dynamic between Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny, and their various supporting cast members and villains. The idea that an FF book would be just as good if it was a teenage Franklin Richards battling Kristoff von Doom is strange and alien to me. And you can apply this to any title you’d care to name. I don’t want to read about Ben Reilly, coffee-shop barista and part-time super-hero. I don’t want to read about Grim and Gritty Cyborg Assassin Bucky, and putting him into a Captain America outfit doesn’t make him Captain America. I, like the rest of the world, could care less about Jared Stevens. I’m not saying there haven’t been good legacy books out there–I loved the John Rogers Blue Beetle run, Tom DeFalco did good things with Spider-Girl, and Wally West is pretty much the poster boy for a successful transition from kid sidekick to official hero, at least until Geoff Johns found out he could bring Barry back. But in general, I think that legacy book succeed despite being legacy books, not because of them. The Silver Age DC relaunches were a unique success that everyone assumes can be repeated easily and effortlessly, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

But I’m a good listener, and this is an open-ended comments section. So please, if you want to see a legacy universe, explain your reasons to me. I’d love to know what makes the idea so appealing to so many!

Okay so you are going to a nerd place where the nerds are and you are thinking “right I need a costume.” Everybody understands this. If you are going to be in a giant roomful of nerds then clearly the thing to do is stand out, and you can’t do that by wearing a black T-shirt with an ironic saying on it.

So what con costume will you choose? There are so many options. And with options, come mistakes. Avoid any of the following:

Just about anything from Lord of the Rings. If you and three friends decide that you will altogether march around in costume as the Witch-King riding his giant evil lizard dragon thingy, that is about the only thing that is not played out from this franchise.1 Do not go as Legolas or Aragorn or Third Hobbit On The Left or one of the zombie kings or an orc or an Fightin’ Uruk-Hai or any of the wizards. All the con people will be all “oh, Lord of the Rings, that is SOOOOOO 2006” and then you will not get nerd-laid, which is mostly the point of going in costume to begin with, right? See also: Jack Sparrow, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Xena, anybody from that show with Hercules where they were in space. I think it was called Hercules In Space.

A really, really obscure superhero. When you are leafing through your comics encylopedias and mint copies of The Complete Handbook To The Marvel Universe and wondering if you will ever find love, ask yourself a simple question: will somebody only kinda interested in comics recognize your costume? There’s a reason you see so many people dressed up as mid-90s X-Men at cons. The yellow-and-green Rogue costume hasn’t been in use for years now but you always see thirty or forty yellow-and-green Rogues at a con cause that is when that girl thought Jim Lee was really cool. If you have to explain that you are Lamprey from the Squadron Supreme to everybody, you are already That Guy. Do not be That Guy.

You can make an exception for guys who are obscure but really funny looking. Like Hypno Hustler, for example. People might think you are one of the Fat Albert kids instead of Hypno Hustler, but you will have a giant Afro either way and they will think that it is awesome.

Razor Fist. Or anybody else who does not have hands, or has replaced their hands with thingies. You know what sucks? Not having hands. Me, I like not having to ask people to help me pee. Maybe you can deal with that. If so, then Razor Fist away! But make sure your razor fists aren’t too sharp or you will probably hurt people other than yourself. Actually you’ll probably poke somebody’s eye out no matter how blunt you make the razor fists. Actually I take it back, you should probably just avoid Razor Fist altogether.

Anybody with an eyepatch. Yeah I get that Nick Fury is awesome and everything, but depth perspective is surprisingly important when you are navigating crowds. You are bobbing and weaving along and then a Wolverine is in front of you but you don’t know how far away his crappy looking fake claws are, and how come every Wolverine costume has the claws popped anyhow? I mean, aren’t the weird muttonchops and maybe a cigar enough to say “I AM WOLVERINE”? If I were Wolverine I’d be totally depressed because everybody thinks it’s all about the claws. I bet he has dreams of things other than clawing. Maybe he wants to open up a traveling sushi restaurant. You don’t know him!

Anybody with a moustache. I’ll just break it to you right now: you can’t pull it off. Goatees are okay. But your traditional pencil-thin moustache, or your handlebar moustache, or your Tom Selleck moustache…? These are a recipe for disaster. The bad kind of disaster. I want you to do me a favour, you go look at your high school yearbooks right now. Find the picture of you when you were sixteen and tried to grow a moustache. It will never get any better than that. At least then you didn’t know better!

The Joker from The Dark Knight. Because you will look like a douchebag.

So, with these guidelines in mind, what is the bestest costume ever?

Obvious!

1. Okay, maybe you could go as the giant flaming eyeball on top of the tower, but that’s one very blocky costume. [↩]

1.) FanExpo is growing so fast it’s honestly hard to believe. Five years ago this was just another shitty corp-con where James Marsters was the headliner. This year? Stan Lee. Nimoy and Shatner. Full editorial presence from DC and Marvel (and promises from both that next year FanExpo will have full portfolio review as per San Diego and New York). A horde of others besides. Don’t get me wrong: in many ways FanExpo is still a shitty corp-con. (And certainly not on par for awesomeoness value with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, of course.) But it’s one that’s exploding. If it keeps growing at this rate, in two years or so it’ll be the second biggest con on the continent after San Diego; it’s already certainly bigger than anything else other than possibly New York.

2.) Of course, it would be really nice if the con organizers would act like they know they have a rapidly exploding convention on their hands, as opposed to, and I am just saying, a bunch of irresponsible idiots. Last year’s FanExpo had major crowding issues in the larger, southern half of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, so bad that they had to stop selling tickets. This year FanExpo couldn’t get the southern building for the con and, instead of purchasing the reservation from the organization which bought it (something other major cons have done in the past), settled for the smaller northern building. The main hall of the northern building is about half the size of the southern building. When they reached building capacity on Saturday (which happened at around noon), they didn’t tell anybody but let people exit (because there isn’t anywhere worthwhile inside the con to get good) and then didn’t let them back in. If the FanExpo organizers don’t get their heads out of their asses and make sure to get both buildings next year, they’ll have overcrowding issues that’ll probably make this year look wonderful in comparison.

3.) That having been said, the gaming area – off to one side, treated like the idiot stepchild of the nerd community – was full but pleasantly so. Justin Mohareb worked his ass off to provide a solid little gaming convention tacked onto the enormous behemoth groaning beneath its own weight that is FanExpo. It was a lovely experience, especially since I was volunteering and therefore did not have to pay for stuff. Well, if I had wanted to eat breakfast with James Marsters, that would have been extra. But I do not think eggs and bacon become better when you eat them with Spike.

4.) Because I was mostly not doing stuff other than helping people play board games, I didn’t do much con stuff. I generally never do. I made an exception this time and went to the DC Comics “how to get into comics” seminar, which was originally supposed to be Joey DeCavileri’s gig but ended up being Dan Didio’s instead. I want to make something clear before I go any further: whatever my beliefs about Didio’s creative tendencies as an editor, I’m a professional and I know a professional when I see one, and Didio was the consumnate professional. He was polite, honest, friendly, and tried to be as supportive of the attendees as possible without failing to be realistic.

5.) Which is important to note because I didn’t really go to the panel to learn how to get into comics, because frankly I did the research on that years ago and know the score. I went because I wanted to see the competition – this is perhaps not the nicest of reasons, but it’s the truth. The good news, from my perspective, is that a lot of people in that room aren’t interested in writing except on their terms, which is stupid: you have to start compromising to write professionally practically from the first word. You have to cut back against your own indulgences. Somebody commented a while back that one page in Al’Rashad contained the first sentence they considered “Birdian,” and that was entirely on purpose from my perspective; I know my tics better than anybody and I know when not to use them.

6.) A pause from this discussion about writing to say that I saw more people dressed up as the Doctor at this con than I have ever seen anywhere, which is good because the Doctor is a good costume: you get to wear nice clothes and most of them are relatively easy to put together. Only the Third Doctor (lace shirt and archaic jacket), Fifth (cricketer’s dress) and especially Sixth (ugly what-the-hell coat plus whiteboy afro) are a bit hard to manage. Heck, you can convert your Harry Potter costume into a Fourth Doctor easily enough: just don’t put on the glasses and fake scar, and cram jellybabies in your pocket.

7.) Also a good costume: Deadpool. This is because no matter how terrible your Deadpool costume is, people love Deadpool and will say “hey! Deadpool!” at you. If you are very fat and dress up as Deadpool, people might even not call you “Fatpool.”

8.) But I digress back to my original point. Of course, there were the usual band of “my question is HOW DARE YOU SIR” types, but Didio shut them down quite excellently by being both respectful and saying over and over again that their issues weren’t the point of the seminar. The point of the seminar was how to get work for DC in any of the major disciplines. He stressed the often low-paying nature of the gig frequently because he wanted to be honest; he explained to people, patiently, what editors looked for in art submissions multiple times. He said, straight-up, that writers looking to get work at the big two have to basically steal somebody else’s job, which means the bar is higher. Much higher. And of course people got offended by this, because people are stupid.

9.) Writing isn’t a zero-sum game, of course. But publishing, to an extent, is. That’s how things go: there isn’t enough paying work for everybody who wants to get paid to get paid, and if you don’t know that, grow up. Didio was patient with the people who didn’t understand that, as he was patient with the dreamers who want to change the business or grow the field. Dreams like that are great, but they don’t get you hired.

10.) And he was patient with the people who obviously didn’t understand the point of a pitch. Multiple people tried to debate Didio when he brought up “the gun pitch.” I’d heard about the gun pitch before (from Paul Levitz, actually, years ago). The gun pitch is “I want to tell the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” And Didio explained that the problem with the pitch is that it’s not a Batman story, which is of course obviously true: if you’re telling the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents, it ends when the Waynes get shot, which means it could be a story about any old gun.

11.) The debaters didn’t get it, of course. “Well, I’d like to read a story about the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” But the point of getting hired in any freelance industry is not “I can do this well,” because lots of people can do that. It’s “I can make your life easier if you give me work.” Pitching the gun story doesn’t make anybody’s life easier, because you’re not gonna give that story to somebody you don’t already know and trust.

12.) Another aside: the shopping at this con was miserably bad. When people are essentially paying a premium to get in the door to buy stuff, there should be, and I am just suggesting this, something resembling a sale price. If I can get it significantly cheaper at Amazon, your sale price is probably not very good. This goes for guy selling the Justin Bieber standups too. Especially the guy selling the Justin Bieber standups.

13.) One more thing: if you want to argue with Dan Didio about the gun pitch, it’s really easy. The trick is to make it a Batman story. You can do it in one sentence.

14. “Somebody is killing people with the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” That one’s for free.

Yesterday, I was busy with this.

This weekend I will be at Fan Expo here in Toronto. I’ll mostly be demonstrating board games (in the gaming area, natch) as a volunteer all weekend, because I don’t really care about panels and don’t need that much time to go shopping. If anybody wants to drop by and play some games, feel free.

BunnyM asks:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on assorted nerd musicians, who you think works, who doesn’t, and perhaps why.

This is big in my mind at the moment because I stumbled over Kirby Krackle earlier this week completely by accident, and they are consuming my headspace in way that hasn’t happened since I found They Might Be Giants in the early 90′s.

Wow, I am so not the person to ask about this. I just went through my Zune (yes I own a Zune shut up) and found songs that could be classified as official nerd subgenre (as opposed to music nerds like but isn’t definitively nerdy, like They Might Be Giants): one MC Chris, one Optimus Rhyme, one Lemon Demon, one Ookla the Mok. I have about twelve hundred songs on that thing, so that’s .3 percent of my portablized music.

This is not due to lack of exposure, either. People send me links to nerd music all the time; nerds self-promoting, nerds promoting their friends, nerds sharing whatever nerd thing they found this week they think is awesome. (I just checked my email right now and I have an email from Kirby Krackle circa March of ’09 saying they liked a post and I should check them out, et cetera.) I usually give anything that gets sent to me at least a single once-over if it doesn’t look like spam.1 I’ve got a pretty wide range of exposure to nerd music, and my honest admission is that it surpasses Sturgeon’s Law quite handily.

Perhaps that’s unfair to an extent, but moments of musical genius are few and far between in nerd music. Clever lyrics, sure, there are plenty of clever lyrics, but only rarely do they raise above the level of simply making the reference and moving on; the more ambitious gambit tends to be “tell Character X’s story in song,” which is marginally tougher. Musical virtuosity is rarer; competency is generally the over/under, or maybe a bit lower.

The takeaway, for me anyway, is this: moments of genuine brilliance in nerd music are few and far between, and certainly they appear at a lesser rate than in non-nerd music. The number of nerd songs I’ve heard that can match up lyrically, to, say, Eminem on an average day? Fingers on one hand. And instrumentally, if a nerd band can be as consistent as Nickelback – friggin’ Nickelback – they’re already in the top quarter of musicality.2 Tack on top of that a general lack of interest in listening to a song about any given superhero or video game character if it’s not really, really funny and you begin to understand my lack of disinterest in nerd music generally.

(I know in comments there will probably be a bunch of “well you haven’t heard THIS,” and hey, have at it; maybe other readers will find good suggestions in the comments. But my track record for “well you haven’t heard THIS” is “no, I haven’t… and now I see why.” Four nerd songs on my Zune, people. Four songs.)

1. At some point spam artists will figure this out and penis extension pills will come disguised in links for X-Men fan fiction. [↩]
2. Which is not surprising when the general self-ranking of many nerd musicians is nerd first, musician second. [↩]